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History Through Images
Clelia Arnaldi di Balme, Enrica Pagella
Prince Eugenio of Savoy-Soissons was an able statesman and man of war, as well as an art
connoisseur and well informed collector of books, paintings and works of art for the vari-
ous Viennese residences. He commissioned the Flemish painter Jan Huchtenburgh to pro-
vide the first official documentation of his victorious military exploits: the cycle of the ten
Battles
for the castle of Schlosshof near Vienna, among which the “Battle of Turin” paint-
ed in 1712 (today in the Sabauda Gallery in Turin). The painting is the model for many sub-
sequent representations of the siege of Turin, especially within the sphere of graphic pro-
duction and the military histories of Prince Eugenio published throughout Europe during
the eighteenth century. The French artist Ignace Jacques Parrocel painted a “Battle of
Turin” in less celebratory terms for the series of the prince’s seven military feats formerly in
the Stadtpalais, today in the Winterpalais in Vienna. The liberation of Turin from the
French siege became a preferred background for portraits of the two main protagonists,
Prince Eugenio and Duke Vittorio Amedeo II, and the subject of many commemorative
medals and furnishings, among which inlaid furniture and stucco reliefs.
In thanks to the Virgin for the victorious results of the battle, between 1717 and 1731 Vit-
torio Amedeo II commissioned Filippo Juvarra to design and build the basilica of Super-
ga, for which Bernardino Cametti sculpted the great marble altarpiece on the high altar in
1729. The City authorities also expressed their thanks: the church of Corpus Domini was
provided with a new altarpiece by the Lombard painter Stefano Maria Legnani, called Il
Legnanino, today in the church of San Massimo in Turin, while the sculptor Carlo
Giuseppe Plura made the processional statue of the Virgin.
Like Prince Eugenio in Vienna, Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy also created an organic frame-
work for the representation of the military glories of the House of Savoy in a dynastic and
commemorative key, constructing the Gallery of Battles in Turin’s Palazzo Reale where
Huchtenburgh’s paintings, bought from Prince Eugenio’s heir, were hung in 1737. This
taste for the dynasty’s great feats led to the series of military exploits commissioned in 1818
by Vittorio Emanuele I from Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti for a new Gallery of Batttles in the
castle of Moncalieri, a project that was not further developed: a good seven of the thirty
scenes painted showed the Battle of Turin and are today in Turin’s Palazzo Reale. The pro-
grammes of dynastic celebrations promoted by Carlo Alberto from the 1830s on took up
the same protagonists of the 1706 events: Eugenio appears among the reliefs by Giacomo
Spalla in the Galleria del Beaumont in Palazzo Reale; among the monochrome frescoes
painted by Pietro and Paolo Fea in the great hall of the Senate in Palazzo Madama; in the
series ordered from Massimo d’Azeglio in 1837 for the dining hall in Palazzo Reale. A
definitive step towards a romantic interpretation was undertaken in 1851 with the battle
painted by Francesco Gonin for Ferdinando of Savoy, Duke of Genoa. Here, alongside the
commanders, emerge the heroes of the people, first among all Pietro Micca di Andorno, in
a decidedly patriotic and Risorgimento key.
Cartographic Representations
Paola Pressenda
The repercussion that the siege had on an international level is testified to also by carto-
graphic representations, where the besieged city was used more or less as a pretext, pro-
duced in large numbers such as had never before occurred for Turin. From a cartographic
point of view, this enjoyed considerable success that was not limited to the years immedi-
ately following the event, but was protracted up to the beginning of the nineteenth centu-
ry. It was the opportunity for inserting maps of the city in collections from which the rep-
resentation of Turin had always been excluded and more in general for a huge production
of maps conceived either singly or for insertion into historical works. If war is usually an
occasion for the production of manuscript cartographic representations which only occa-
sionally found a printed form, the events of 1706 were, instead, a pretext for increasing the
number of printed maps of the city of Turin. A characteristic common to all the produc-